Question Renderer Light Probes behaviour changed in 2022.3?

Using built-in renderer.

I upgraded from v2021.x to 2022.3 and now my game objects stay bright when I darken a scene, for example setting up a night time scene. This all worked fine before upgrading.

The only way I can get my objects to be affected by the reduction in light is to change the default setting on each renderer for Light Probes from the default of Blend Probes to OFF.

I don't currently use any light probes.

Any idea how to fix this without having to change the Light probes setting on every mesh?

 

How do you "darken a scene"? Are you rebaking your light probes after you change your lighting?

 

I'm using the Enviro Sky asset for changing between day/night cycles, I don't bake any light data and I don't have any light probes, but the problem persists even with that asset's game objects turned off in the scene (after already having made it night time).

I haven't really spent much time on lighting yet because it was all good enough out of the box with Enviro.

This is a link to a GIF on my onedrive showing the problem in playmode: https://1drv.ms/i/s!AjLMZMLArtRQgew6h8ACIv4SjDYMrQ?e=m9XH4X

What I don't get is this only happens in my runtime additive main gameplay scene. If I run that gameplay scene by itself the lighting seems fine.
I've tried to narrow down what might be causing the issue by turning on/off everything, changing all settings, all graphics levels/options etc and nothing makes a difference.

The only way I've been able to cause the effect to go away is by changing that Light Probes setting on each individual renderer.

 

Each scene has an ambient probe unless you explicitly disable it.

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/RenderSettings-ambientProbe.html

 

Enviro Sky takes care of all the environment lighting settings, and that works fine in all scenes except my main gameplay scene when it loads during normal gameplay (game menu, load scene additive etc).

However I have reviewed all the lighting settings multiple times, changed everything multiple times, but I can't figure out what is causing the problem.

 

My guess is your menu does not have enviro sky or whatever it’s called and its ambient probe stays loaded.

 

Is there a way to confirm if that ambient probe is active?

My scene set up is like this:
- Main Menu scene
- menu loads a sub-scene for a background
- player goes through menu to start game which loads the gameplay scene

I have now added custom Lighting Settings to all 3 scenes and have turned Recalculate Environment Light OFF so the ambient probe should be disabled.

Despite that, the problem still exists.

Also, is there any mention of any of this in any release notes for unity version 2022.3? I haven't found anything and I really hate chasing new problems without any context of what changed.

 

I think I remember seeing something about additive scenes and ambient probes, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

Regardless, if you really don't want to use lightprobes, why not disable light probe usage everywhere? It will be more performant this way. You can write a script to go through your scenes and disable it everywhere.

 

Is there a global way to disable it all, or change the default on all renderers to use a default of OFF instead of Blend Probes? I'd rather not have to write scripts to catch all possible objects in all possible scenarios.

I've tried turning off everything in related lighting settings with no luck.

EDIT: I also tried upgrading to 2022.3.4f1 since it listed something about probes changing/fixing, but it also didn't help.

 

Well I have at least isolated where the problem is coming from and found a workaround. I'm still not clear on why this happens.

The problem is coming from my background sub-scene in my main menu. It's a 3D scene used as background while my main menu is running, pretty normal in games these days.

That scene had baked light data and baked reflection probes. I'm not sure which actually mattered but I cleared the baked data and the problem is gone.

The thing is that scene is unloaded before my main gameplay scene finishes loading. So I don't see how an unloaded scene's baked data can affect any other scene, but that seems to be what was happening.

At this point I no longer care what the actual problem is since I've wasted enough time on this.

And note, this only happened after upgrading the editor to 2022.3.